On Dec. 17, 1968, I was surrounded by a lot of people that I did not know. We were in an Army Depot in Boston, and we were all being sworn in to our respective services to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution. Christmas was coming, a beautiful time of year, and here I was on an airplane on my way to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas for basic training. I couldn't believe this was happening. I had a good paying job and a beautiful automobile, a 1960 Thunderbird with a 390 high-rise Holley four barrel, and I was going to miss Christmas. How did I lose all of it? The answer: the Vietnam War and the draft. I started remembering the funeral of the neighbor's son who was killed in Vietnam when the jeep he was riding in hit a land mine.
I finally arrived at the San Antonio airport and I was hurried into a military bus, as were a lot of other recruits. We arrived at the training center late at night and were put in line, filed at attention. In the distance I could hear the sound of taps from an individual's shoes coming in our direction. It was the drill sergeant, and he immediately started yelling and demoralizing us. I thought to myself, "I don't deserve this nor do I want it." I felt like a prisoner and less confident than I had ever been.
The nightmare continued when I was assigned to a Texas-born Air Force drill instructor who didn't like people from Boston—or at least that was the impression I got from his continuous harassment of and physical abuse toward me. When climbing the tower on the obstacle course, he gave me an item to carry up with me, knowing darn well I required both my hands, but I made it. He kept having a large individual nudge me into the instructor known as The Bear, and kept saying don't hit him or he would have to hit me. He came into where the bunks were and while at attention he kicked me, knocking me back against my footlocker and I banged my head. He would always have the squad leader unbutton some of my clothes, which required me to do 20 push-ups for every button unbuttoned. Everyday he would require me to go to each drill instructors' table and tell them I parked my car in Harvard Yard, and when I only got a few bites of food he would say the meal was over.
I was getting mad and concerned for my well-being, so I went AWOL from the squadron, told the chaplain what was going on and told him I was concerned about my well-being. The chaplain made a phone call and told me to go back to the squadron, which I did.
When I returned, The Bear was waiting for me in the middle of the street. He yelled at me and called me a chaplain's boy, and I never had a problem after that. The problems I had experienced with The Bear had made me a better person—never doing the same to other people and learning to work with them instead of against them. An end to a beginning!
